In this week’s Open Bar Review, Paul argues the merits of plane-jane-boring origin stories and hard drugs.
As fresh as it feels in a movie, Arrival is based on Ted Chiang’s 2000 Nebula Award winning novella Story of Your Life. For real mind-benders, modern science fiction literature is still a relatively obscure but very deep well to draw from. Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.
Real twist endings, the kind that make you reconsider the entire movie, have been out of style for years now, but new alien contact film Arrival is bringing them back.
Arrival is set after 12 space ships touch down on Earth. To address the one in Montana, the U.S. military recruits one of the world’s top linguists, Louise Banks (Amy Adams), who is still reeling from the loss of her teenage daughter. Along with physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), she is tasked with figuring out why the visitors have come before China opens fire on their pod due to confusion over a word that could be “weapon” or “tool.”
Images courtesy A24.
American Honey is a vibrant mashup of a coming-of-age road movie and a smut film, blending shock value with a unique emotional experience.
The film follows Star (Sasha Lane), a late teenager in a bad situation. She happens across a traveling magazine sales pyramid scheme in a K Mart parking lot and becomes enamored with Jake (Shia LaBeouf), who invites her to join them. Star ditches her boyfriend’s children with their mother and runs off to join the circus. American Honey is the meandering, three-hour long story of her adventures traveling across the rural Midwest.
The eye contact games are subtly one of the stronger parts of Denial. Images courtesy Bleeker Street.
Man, Oscarbate movies really suck. If you know what you’re looking for, they feel way too much like an advertisement for something you couldn’t buy even if you wanted to. They’re just, they’re not fun to watch.
Denial is based on the autobiographical History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier by Deborah Lipstadt. It follows Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) through said lawsuit, brought in 1996 by Holocaust denier David Irving (Timothy Spall) and finally brought to court in 2000. Irving accused Lipstadt of libel for calling him a liar in her 1993 book about the history of Holocaust denial, and he filed in the U.K. where the burden of proof in libel lawsuits falls on the defendant, not the accuser. Lipstadt must prove that Irving intentionally ignored the facts of the Nazi genocide or otherwise settle out of court and give legal validity to the claims that it never happened.
Everything about Denial is built around the goal of getting its lead actor an Oscar, and everything wrong with it flows through the problems with its main character.
Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.
The cultural phenomenon just got even shinier and even more chrome.
In the year and a half since Mad Max: Fury Road’s release, writer/director/series mastermind George Miller has been talking about black and white and score-only versions of the film that he claims are even better than the theatrical release. He said they’d be on the initial home media release, but they were cut. This makes sense — immediately releasing a special edition leaves money on the table because no one will by the standard one. Cinephiles rejoiced when the Black and Chrome edition was announced for this holiday season, but what was kept relatively quiet was that this version would return to theaters last weekend.
There’s never been a movie that benefits more from the big screen than Fury Road, and there may never have been a movie that benefits more from a black and white conversion.
Reel Entropy 